Chapter One #2
The last time he failed, he and Arlo sparred so intensely they’d both ended up in Joanna’s clinic with half their bones broken. The repairs to the gym were still coming out of their pay.
But it was more than just a need for release. It was about a tangled knot of purpose and thwarted instinct, a result of all that malicious rewiring Thaddeus and his trainers had labored so intensely over. Without the hunt, he was useless. Purposeless. A weapon with no edge and no enemy.
To return to the barracks unsuccessful was, in his mind, worse than failure. It meant that he’d failed his only purpose in life.
The bar was his last hope. The sun would rise soon, and that meant that the Haight district would be flooded with vampires headed home for the day.
Not all of them, just like not all of the business that was conducted within the confines of The Lush, were criminal in nature.
But he’d had luck there in the past, so he figured it was a good final stop of the night.
A low metal groan drew his attention to the bar’s back door. The thumping beat of the music grew louder as it opened. A small yellow light flickered to life above the frame with the motion, casting a watery glow over the figure that slipped out.
“…next week! I’ll let you know if my schedule changes!” A chipper, feminine voice was the last thing he expected in the dank filth of the alley.
Sloane didn’t move a muscle as he waited for her to step out from behind the door. A chorus of voices called out to her, wishing her goodnight before she let the door swing closed behind her.
She was willowy, with lithe limbs and a head of long raven hair.
Her skin was a deep olive tone that looked silky to the touch.
When she stood there for a moment, her focus on digging in the glittery purse slung over her shoulder, he had what felt like all the time in the world to observe the soft curve of her nose and sooty fan of her lashes against the tops of her cheeks.
She was arrant. He knew it at a glance, something inside of him flinching instinctively away from the devastating vulnerability of her. To someone like him, everything about her was almost perverse in its softness.
One painfully delicate hand rummaged in that ridiculous purse, the bones of her wrist flashing beneath the sleeve of her pale pink sweater with every movement. So much smaller than his. So easy to snap.
Elves had eaten humans, once. They’d eaten pretty much anyone weaker than them, and no one was weaker than arrants — those poor humans born without even the flimsy protection of magic.
To Sloane, this pitiful little creature looked like a doe, blissfully unaware of the wolf hiding just out of sight.
Something pulled inside him; a deep, sucking sort of feeling he couldn’t easily identify. It wasn’t anticipation and it wasn’t quite hunger. It was some foreign mix of both and neither — a need that had no name, no predecessor, and no equal.
She wasn’t prey. Not the kind he sought, anyway. And yet she was something he needed to possess.
The woman stood in that dim light for several long moments, tapping away at her phone. Her lips, shiny with some sort of makeup, were set in a soft pout. The cool light from her phone’s screen reflected in them like a beacon.
The more he stared at them, the worse that nameless need became.
A wild kind of anger sparked to life as he watched her, like her helplessness and ignorance were a personal slight.
How could she not sense him there, crouched mere feet away?
Had she even bothered to look around the alley before she stepped out?
Didn’t she realize what an elf could do to her with barely any thought at all?
Their bones were harder than concrete. Their claws had a molecular structure similar to diamonds. Their upper and lower fangs were self-sharpening and could come together with a bite force great enough to bend steel. He was a predator unlike anything else on the planet and she was…
Beautiful.
Sloane blinked, taken off-guard by the thought. As far as he could remember, he’d never used the word in his life. There hadn’t been any reason.
But when she tucked her phone back in her bag with a soft sigh and brushed her hair back behind her ear, it was the only word that made sense. She was beautiful. Something in the way her features were put together and the softness that radiated out of her like heat off blacktop made her that way.
Sloane reared back, sinking further into the shadows as he examined the strange creature. To him, she seemed like something that came from another world. The reasons why wouldn’t come to him no matter how hard he tried to drag them out.
She wasn’t any different from the thousands of people he’d encountered — and hundreds he’d killed — in his lifetime. A human was a human. An elf was an elf. Everyone could be killed, so no one was special.
She wasn’t even doing anything interesting.
He doubted she was on her way to commit a crime.
Going by the short black dress under the pink sweater and the fact that she used the employee exit told him she was likely a server just getting off work for the night.
There was nothing, nothing, noteworthy about her at all.
But he followed her.
When she walked out of the alley in her tennis shoes, a hum in her elegant throat, he was right behind her. The reasons why continued to evade him but they mattered less and less with every step.
It took him a block to realize what he was doing, and only after a man passed a little too close to her for his comfort.
Protection duty.
His boot nearly hit a discarded can as he quickly dipped into the shadows between buildings, his gaze locked on the slim shape of her back and swaying hair.
He’d never been allowed on a protection assignment before.
Those were given to Vesta and Cesare, who liked people best, or Arlo and Lucien, who were inseparable and required unique assignments.
No one, not even their new, progressive captain, would consider Sloane fit for a job that didn’t require killing.
But he followed her. And he was pretty sure he didn’t want to kill her.
Sloane’s vision narrowed until all he could see was the shape of his prey. The sense that something terrible was going to happen to her, that if he looked away for even a moment she’d be taken from him, was overwhelming.
His blood rushed in his ears, nearly blocking out the sounds of the street that filtered in through his helmet’s speakers. It felt hotter than normal. Brighter. Like he’d been injected with something that made him feel… more. Bigger.
So when she turned a corner into another dark alley, clearly intending to cut time on her walk, it was a shock to feel something in his chest lurch. The fine hair on the back of his neck prickled with unease.
She clearly didn’t hear the shuffling footsteps at the other end of the alley or have the honed instinct to detect threats that he did. Something was wrong. Something was waiting. For the first time in his life, the urge to reveal himself not to kill but to protect nearly overwhelmed him.
Sloane abandoned his cover just in time to hear a high, nervous laugh.
“Oh, Cole! I didn’t see you,” she exclaimed, too far away.
When Sloane entered the long, narrow alley, he found a reedy man standing over the doe, one hand clasped on the softest part of her upper arm.
Neither appeared to notice their audience when the man replied, “Your blonde friend wasn’t working tonight.
I figured you’d need some company walking home, so I caught up with you. ”
“That’s really nice of you, but I don’t think Roxanna would be too happy if she knew you were walking other girls home, Cole.
Best you should get along, huh?” The cadence of her voice changed.
It slowed and sweetened, reminding him of the way he’d heard some people speak to their pets or bawling young.
Sloane walked slowly, the tread of his boots silent on the cracked concrete. That needy, aching thing in him began to beat at the underside of his sternum — a steady thump, thump, thump to match his footsteps.
“C’mon, Cece,” Cole whined, “she won’t know. She’s been too busy for me, anyway.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but I really need to get home.” The woman, Cece — such an odd, pretty name for an odd, pretty woman — moved to step around Cole.
Several things happened at once: the man grabbed her arm to yank her back toward the dingy brick wall, Cece yelped, and Sloane moved.
Fighting and killing were muscle memory. Blinded, bleeding, and impaired by a severe head wound — it wouldn’t make a difference. He’d fight entirely on autopilot and win, because losing hadn’t been an option since he was six years old.
His reaction to the sight of a man grabbing her, however, was something altogether different.
It wasn’t autopilot. It wasn’t even instinct. It was a sudden and explosive severing of a nerve, that essential mechanism that kept him so tenuously tethered to basic decency.
One moment he was standing in the shadows, watching a hand close around her pink-swathed arm, and the next his own hand held the back of Cole’s head against the gritty brick and mortar.
A watery scream escaped the man’s throat as the delicate bones and cartilage of his face gave way under the pressure.
Sloane didn’t hear any of it. Flames engulfed his senses. His fury was the kind that could only be described as scorched earth, a feeling so all-consuming that it destroyed everything it touched.
Until someone touched him.